​ IN MEMORIA | Zack Bent

For the past 4 years, I have been making regular trips to a parcel of land south of Cle Elum, Washington that was scorched by fire in the summer of 2014. I was enamored with the mysterious and meditative quality of the darkened, transformed landscape and employed it as a stage set for photographing sculptural and environmental interventions. At the center of these pictures are my 3 sons who activate the vast setting through collaboration, play and myth-making. In the passage to and from this public land, the unsettling relationship between domestication and wilderness has become blurred so that works created on and off-site seem to fixate on unraveling loss, fear and transience. In Memoria continues the work of visiting this site and creating alignments between the experience of time and the depiction of its passage both in the land’s shift from death to rebirth and also in the subtle change in my sons as they morph from childhood to adolescence. The exhibition includes photographs and sculptures created with overwintered tarps compressed by snow and animal bedding, a questionable foraging experiment and video that explores time halted and hastened.